ABSTRACT
Recently, education reform has emphasized ‘systemic’ approaches. These approaches reflect the complexity and comprehensiveness of the changes that education faces in the last decade of the twentieth century. Examples of systemic attempts to reform education includes the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, the Education Reform Act of 1988 in England and Wales, and the British Columbia Year 2000: A Framework for Learning published by the Ministry of Education in May 1990. This general press for systemic reform involves educational leaders in working with teachers to achieve the implementation of new programs and practices. Most teachers, however, view themselves as the primary advocates for students and their learning. Thus, whereas education reformers set out to change schools by making large and striking systemic changes, many teachers attempt to ‘think big, [but] start small’ (Fullan, 1992) by engaging in researching teaching as a way of transforming classrooms into places of learning. For such teachers, learning is both an individual and social process, students are co-constructors of knowledge and active participants in the process, and they, as teachers, are curriculum makers. How then can leaders work in such a context to bring about systemic change without their relations with teachers degenerating into a what Blumberg (1984) has termed a ‘private, cold war?’ If practitioner inquiry is to flourish, then we need to know more about the conditions under which teacher research groups operate. We also need to know how teachers transform their practitioner stories and conversations into concerted pedagogical action that leads to rejuvenated learning for students.
